


Police Search for Florida Man Who Broke Into Counseling Center, Ate Doritos, Clogged Toilet

by advancedclass



Category: Original Work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-26
Updated: 2019-08-26
Packaged: 2020-09-27 08:40:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 638
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20404858
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/advancedclass/pseuds/advancedclass





	Police Search for Florida Man Who Broke Into Counseling Center, Ate Doritos, Clogged Toilet

They were following him.

He couldn't see them through the clammy fog clinging low to the ground, but he could hear them, their gait unsteady and wetly shuffling; the sound of a shambling attempt at a run on legs unequally sized, bloated, leaking. A schlooping sound, punctuated by ear-piercing cries of 'SKREE', the only sharpness in this moist and sunless landscape he had found himself in after the car broke down.

They weren't fast, but it didn't matter.

The small town had a pothole problem that would put a big city to shame, sudden holes in the road seeming to appear out of nowhere, his vision was so obscured, gaping monstrosities that seemed to have absorbed not only the street but the very world within the invisible sphere of clouded nothing radiating from the ground. Impossible, of course, but these were the things your eyes thought they saw when you could barely discern the shape of your hand in front of your face. He had to move with care, lest he trip and fall into one of the holes, which would surely make him an easy target for them, if the holes were finite. Which they were. Of course. Nothing else would be possible.

They were the closest to life he had encountered. He might as well have been in a ghost town.

Windows were dark, grime-dusted, with barely legible signs stating they were LOSE, GO OUT BUSINESS, or LAST CHANCE, decorated with enlarging spider cracks in the glass. He tried banging the windows with his fists, no response, no weakness, no sudden dangerously promising shattering of glass. He rattled doorknobs ineffectively, only to find the locks broken. Although they weren't, of course. They were effective. Too effective. Effective beyond the needs of their absent installers.

They were tireless; he wasn't.

He rounded a corner and grasped another doorknob, hopeless and reflexive.

It turned.

With great resistance the door pushed open, raising clouds of heavy dust that turned to sticking clogging plaster as it mingled with the blinding warmth of the fog. He opened his mouth to swear, only to find it filled with sticking dust and clogging threads of spider web. Coughing and spitting, he shoved the door shut behind him. Likely, it would not stop them, but it might delay them long enough for him to find a way out of town, a functional car, another human being.

A gun.

Why could he not find a single gun in this awful horror of a hippie village?

Despite repeated failures, he looked around the building he had found himself in. Searching through desks and drawers, he found secreted packets of emergency snacks, crinkled or sticky, ancient beyond their recent expiry dates. He ripped open a bag of Spicy Chili Lime Doritos, desperate for energy, or something to take the taste of spiders and dust from his mouth.

He regretted it.

Between his teeth the Doritos became living things, squirming fragments of nightmares with chitinous shells crunching, segmented legs tickling at the inside of his cheeks, sharp antennae scraping against the roof of his mouth. Worst of all, they still tasted like expired Spicy Chili Lime Doritos.

He rushed for a bathroom, as grimy and disrepaired as everything else, and spat the contents of his mouth into a toilet. Again and again he spat, and vomited, far more than he could have fit in his mouth or stomach. In the bowl floated creatures larger than the biggest cockroach he'd ever seen, traffic cone orange and furiously moving, even those that had been severed by his teeth and were oozing violent green innards. Some climbed on their comrades, escaping the water and bile and prison of the toilet, leaving sticky orange-green trails behind them, reaching for him, looking to return to the orifice that had birthed them.

He ran.


End file.
